Genius Billionaire Playboy Surgeon
by NezumiPi
Summary: Bucky Barnes appears in Tony Stark's kitchen looking for aid. Tony doesn't want to help the guy who tore apart his team and murdered his parents, unless he's blaming the bullet when he should really be focusing on the guy with the gun.
1. Chapter 1

James Buchanan Barnes was in the kitchen. It wouldn't be notable if Barnes was in _a_ kitchen. It was practically inevitable that the guy would have entered a kitchen at some point in the recent past. No, the problem was that he was in _the_ kitchen, Tony Stark's kitchen to be exact. He was standing perfectly still with his back to the refrigerator.

"FRIDAY! Call the others! We need to-"

"Wai-" said Barnes. He didn't even manage to get the 't' on the end.

"Wait?" asked Tony, voice filled with enough skepticism to power a small Midwestern town (if he could ever manage to invent and patent a sarcasm-based photovoltaic cell, which - realistically - was probably at least eighteen months out). "You want me to wait? For what? You already killed my parents and tried to kill me? You want to finish the job? Sure, I'll get the suit and we can go a few rounds."

"Egnh," said Barnes.

"Was that Russian? FRIDAY, translate."

"Sergeant Barnes' utterance appears to be a non-lexical grunt, sir," answered Friday primly.

Barnes hadn't moved at all. Now that the shock was dying down, Tony looked him over. He was wearing black jeans and an oversized sweatshirt. He was shaven, but unevenly so. He was sweating and his pupils were dilated.

"FRIDAY, check his vitals," said Tony, before looking Barnes in the eye. "Why are you here? Are you on drugs or something? Do they even work on you?"

Barnes didn't answer. He didn't even appear to have heard Tony, bloodshot eyes fixated in the middle distance on nothing in particular.

"FRIDAY?" prompted Tony.

"Lacking baseline data for his unique physiology, his biosignature is difficult to interpret. If he is compared to Captain Rogers' baseline, his heart rate, breathing, and galvanic skin resistance all suggest acute distress."

Tony rolled his eyes. So there was maybe a problem, but no information on _what_ problem. Assuming, of course, that Barnes could be compared to Rogers and who knew if that was even true? "Why? Are? You? Here?" asked Tony, over-enunciating each word. "Have you been shot? Are you planning on assassinating me? Are you surrendering yourself to the government? Are you after me Lucky Charms?"

Barnes blinked a few times in quick succession but otherwise showed no response. A few seconds passed and he opened his mouth as if to speak (or perhaps grunt again) but no sound came out.

"All right, it's past your bedtime. FRIDAY, call Rog-"

Before Tony could even finish Steve's name, Barnes let out a horrific noise that sounded like a banshee with laryngitis.

Great, just great. All Tony had wanted was a pesto-and-buffalo-mozzarella-on-honey-wheat grilled cheese sandwich and now he was dealing with the guy who murdered his mother who was apparently too out of it to bait with Yakov Smirnov jokes. "Well, come on," said Tony, beckoning along as he walked toward his lab. "I'm sure I can rig up a basic CAT scan or something."

Barnes' brow furrowed slowly, as though he were struggling to concentrate on Tony's words, or maybe on his gesture. After nearly a minute, he began to walk slowly after Tony, with a strange, stiff gait.

Tony turned around and watched Barnes walk. There was an unevenness to it. The right arm swung naturally with the left leg, but the left arm was stiff. "It's the arm, isn't it? Something happened to it or it just malfunctioned." Barnes didn't answer, but he didn't have to. "So you came to me to fix it, naturally, because I'm just such a nice guy that I'm happy to help repair the Soviet murder arm of the man who literally killed my parents." Tony scoffed. "You've been spending too much time around Captain Perfect. He might do something like that. He'd probably suck your dick to say thanks for the opportunity. But I am not him. I have more sense than that. I'm happy its broken. I hope it rusts and falls off and you have to take a job as Jimmy One-Arm, long-haired mob enforcer."

Barnes showed no sign of having heard Tony's rant.

Tony sighed. He hated not having an audience. "I'm not fixing it," he said. "I just want to get a look at the tech and prove once and for all that mine's better." He gestured to a faintly glowing blue circle toward the middle of the room. "Step up there. We can at least get an X-ray scan."

Barnes squinted at Tony's hands as he pointed to the scanner. He very slowly turned his head in the direction Stark was pointing. Only after doing so did he walk into the ring.

"All right," said Tony, "let's see how those Soviet bastards pulled this off." Tech was tech, and it was rare that Tony got to see craftsmanship (other than his own) that was worth gawking at. A greenish ring of light began to rise around Barnes with horizontal pulses orbiting around it. "I bet they didn't even figure out how to- Holy fuck," Stark whispered, interrupting himself as the preliminary scan materialized. "It's attached to your spine? To your fucking spine? Of course, because they didn't have vibranium, it would have been too heavy, your clavicle would have snapped. So they anchored it to your-? Shit. That's barbaric. I mean, literally barbaric. Rome was sacked by Visigoths with prosthetics made of stone and mastodon hide attached to their spines. No, that's not true. I just made it up, but it sounds like it could be true and that's the goddamn point, isn't it?"

Barnes' breathing was studiously silent, but Tony could see from his readings that it was labored. The guy must know how to wheeze without making a sound (all the better to sneak up and murder people).

"It's no more than you deserve," said Tony. "We've got good vets in this country, men and women who served with honor and never laid a finger on a civilian, who don't have good prosthetics yet. They have to be individualized. I'm not about to bump you to the head of the line just because you're friends with-" The full scan appeared on Tony's readout and he stopped, stunned into momentary silence. "It's not just attached to your spine, it's impinging on it. It's malfunctioning, sending signals along the dorsal nerve root that...no wonder you can't talk! It's a miracle you can fucking _stand_."

Tony sat down on wheeled stool, resting his elbow on his leg and his temples on his hand. He was no doctor (although he did have multiple doctorates, a fact which he wished more people would remember). He wasn't a _medical_ doctor. He couldn't even remember the difference between aspirin and acetaminophen most days. But after Rhodey's injury, he'd made it his business to learn everything he could about the human spinal column, which is how he knew that the nerve bundles entering closest to the back carried sensory information to the brain, while those closer to the chest carried motor information to the body. The back bundles, the dorsal bundles, could carry any bodily sensation from below the neck: no visual or auditory information, but heat, pressure, friction, even internal experiences like a full bladder. And, of course, pain. Direct stimulation via electricity or pressure nearly always produced agonizing pain, or - at best - a sort of pins-and-needles-on-steroids feeling called 'parasthesia' that, Tony assumed, was also horrible.

Barnes' arm had six anchor points along his spine. One, attached to the cervical vertebrae, was in good condition. Three more were failing, tilted off at odd angles that caused compression and tension. The final two, both in the lumbar region, were completely wrecked. He must've taken a blow in combat because they had inverted, jamming screws directly into his sensory neurons.

"Hey, Mr. Creepface," said Tony. It wasn't his finest insult, but there was no one around to appreciate it anyway. "Can you take painkillers? Do they work on you? Sedatives? Anesthetic?" Tony wasn't entirely clear on the degree to which Barnes had supersoldier traits.

Predictably, Barnes didn't answer. It was probably only his decades of training (brainwashing), Tony realized, that kept him on his feet instead of curled up in a ball screaming.

"There has to be a way to knock you out," muttered Tony. "They put it in, didn't they?" He looked up at Barnes and exhaled mightily, as if all this were an annoying chore, rather than a vexing moral conundrum. "I'm not going to do it, mind you. I'm not fixing that arm. But I'll give you a workup on it. See if I can figure out the proper dose of horse tranquilizers needed to get in there while I'm at it. And then you leave, got it?"

* * *

James Rhodes carefully lowered himself into the chair in front of Tony's high res computer screen. He could nearly always do this without falling now, but it required concentration. He couldn't rely on his legs to reflexively, actively support his weight at any angle other than perpendicular to a flat ground.

Tony didn't actually acknowledge his friend's presence, just kept scrolling through PDFs and images.

"What are we looking at?" asked Rhodes, once he was settled in the chair. He allowed his eyes to focus on the screen in front of him. "Holy...where did you get all this?"

"Places," said Tony.

"You got records on the Winter Soldier's brainwashing from _places_?" Rhodes was getting pissed. He was a decorated officer and he did not have time for this shit.

"He's in the secondary lab down the hall," said Tony, as though this actually explained where he got the files.

"Who is?"

"Winter Soldier. Barnes. Whatever," Tony waved his hand indifferently. "Vision's with him."

Rhodes took the tone that he pretty much always felt the need to take with Tony: exasperated, faintly angry disbelief. "The Winter Soldier is in your house and you didn't feel the need to lead with that? Is he under arrest? Did you capture him? Why is-"

Tony made incoherent 'stop your silly questions' noises and spun around 180 degrees. Of course, Rhodes was sitting next to him, so he had to course correct and spin back to look his friend in the eye. "I'm going to operate on him," said Tony, clapping his hands together once with eager finality.

"There are so many things wrong with that sentence, I don't even know where to begin." Rhodes wondered if there was a chance he was asleep, then rejected the idea on the grounds that his subconscious was not dumb enough to think up this plot. "Let's start with the fact you're not a surgeon."

"He doesn't need a surgeon. He need a mechanic. And I'm brilliant at that."

"You're going to fix his arm? Why would you do that?"

Tony ignored his friend's question in favor of the one he felt like answering. "You might be wondering how we're going to knock him out for the procedure." (Rhodes actually hadn't wondered that because he had assumed that the arm would just be removed, fixed, and reattached.) "Remember how Rogers can't get drunk? It's not just his paragon-ish patriotic virtue, it's a super-charged liver. Barnes has the same thing, but not exactly the same. He needs more anesthesia than a regular guy, but we don't know how much more. Vision's running tests on him right now."

"And the HYDRA records?"

"I was trying to find out how they anesthetized him."

"And?"

There was finally a pause in Tony's patter. "They didn't. Too much anesthesia will kill anyone, but a partial paralytic...well, as long as you've got a respirator and a pacemaker, you won't die."

"A paralytic? But he'd be awake."

"Yeah." Tony sounded vacant, like he wasn't entirely present in his own words. "They did try a few other things. Ketamine made him go nuts, killed a couple of nurses. Later on they just used topical anesthetic and punished him for moving." Tony looked back at the screen. "Play July 19, 1972."

"I don't know if I want to see this," said Rhodes, but he didn't look away.

A nude man lay face down on a gurney, his metal arm supported on a solid steel table of the same height. His skin was so pale it was past white and into blue, covered in sweat and streaked with iodine. The man's face was pointed directly downward and so was not visible. There were nurses and guards. One guard held a stick, eighteen inches long and three-quarters inch in diameter. A surgeon was working on Barnes' left shoulder. The camera wasn't zoomed in enough to provide a clear view of the operation, but every few minutes, Barnes would stir with the tiniest of movements. At first, Rhodes couldn't even see what was triggering the punishment, but eventually he noticed a twitch in Barnes' fingers or a tensing in his calves. At each of these actions, minimal though they were, the guard jabbed Barnes with the stick. There was obviously electricity running through it, based on the way it made Barnes' hair move. Not to mention the fine pink and red burns it left behind.

"Picana," said Rhodes. "What he's using, it's called a picana. And if it's leaving marks like that, there's no way he could just lay there. He should be screaming."

Tony didn't visibly react to this information, but Rhodes knew he was taking it in. "This part," said Tony, "I don't get."

The surgeon asked a nurse for a tool; it was passed. Barnes whimpered. That was apparently against the rules because the guard with the picana jammed it in Barnes' anus.

Rhodes gasped at that, in involuntary, sympathetic pain. He rolled his eyes upward to give himself a respite from watching what was on the screen.

Tony paused the recording, an act which thankfully hid the image from view. "See, I don't get that."

"What don't you get? They're torturing him, Tony."

"No, they're repairing him. For fucked up, torturous reasons, yes, but they call him Asset. He's useful to them. Why would they-?" Tony twitched and changed tactics. "There aren't nearly as many nerve endings in the rectum as on the hands, the face, the soles of the feet. It would hurt more on one of those. So why stick the damn thing up his ass?"

"Sexual assault as a form of torture is-"

"Yeah, I know. I read the same textbook. Supposed to be worse than physical assault. But why would it be worse? Because there's shame, violation, humiliation. He can't feel any of that. They beat it out of him decades before." Tony pointed to the list of files. "I've seen them catheterize him, debride a burn on his scrotum, masturbate him to collect semen samples for god knows what purpose." Tony twitched again. The purpose was obvious. Please god don't let Barnes have children. "And he never reacted once, not after 1955 or so. He didn't feel violated because in his mind there's nothing to violate."

"Tony," said Rhodes gently, "how many of these videos have you watched?"

"I don't know. What time is it?"

Rhodes looked at the list of files on the screen. There were hundreds, maybe thousands. "Why are you watching these?"

"I told you, to figure out how to operate on him, fix his arm."

Rhodes crossed his arms. "You also told me that HYDRA didn't have any good methods of sedating him and that Vision's working out the anesthesia protocol right now."

Tony massaged both of his temples and sighed, long and low. "It took me a while to figure that out, that they had nothing," he said, sounding almost defeated. And then, "He killed my parents, Rhodey. If I'm going to help him…How can I justify helping him if I think he had any, any choice at all in the matter?"

They were both quiet after that.

Finally, Rhodes put his hand on Tony's shoulder. "You remember what I said to you after Afghanistan?"

"You said a lot of things."

"I said that I thought the military does cadets a disservice by making them think they can resist a thorough interrogation. And it was true. You hadn't told me what they did to you yet, but they had you for so long, I thought maybe you had given something up and I didn't want you blaming yourself for that."

They made eye contact. Rhodes thought that Tony got the message. If Tony wasn't to blame for giving in to the Ten Rings, then Barnes could hardly be blamed for submitting to Hydra, and Tony could help him without guilt. Rhodes had attended Howard and Maria's funerals. He had done his damnedest to keep a self-destructing Tony from going completely off the rails in the months that followed. If Tony had just told Barnes to fuck off, Rhodes would have understood. But if Tony wanted to do the surgery, well, then Rhodes would see to it that he had just plenty of proof that Barnes was brainwashed, enough that he wouldn't feel like he was betraying his parents' memory, but no more than that. More than that was just Tony tormenting himself and triggering his own PTSD.

"Now," said Rhodes, "I've got two questions: Why am I here, and why isn't Rogers?"

"You're here because he's already out of his mind with pain and we're going to anesthetize him and who knows how that'll work. I need you to put on the suit and keep him in line if he comes out of surgery all fucked up and murderous." Tony shrugged. "And, you know, moral support." He mumbled the last two words.

"And Rogers?"

"Besides the fact he's a fugitive?"

Rhodes just waited. Tony obeyed the laws that suited him.

"Because he doesn't need to see this shit, okay? He was finally starting to get along with the future when this guy comes back and you know it's killing him just imagining what it was like, just reading about it. You think seeing it isn't going to completely fuck him up?"

"I don't know about that. I know I watched the video the Ten Rings released of you...I don't know, at least a hundred times. I also know that if Barnes wakes up from surgery semi-conscious and crazy, it's Rogers who will have the best chance of calming him down."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I called him half an hour ago. He was all ready to cash in political favors and walk in the front door, but I talked him down to hopping shipping containers and sneaking around. It's slower but safer. He balked, but I pointed out that Barnes picked me, not the other way around."

Rhodes nodded slowly. "When's the last time you had a drink, Tony?"

Tony looked at his watch. "About four hours ago. Vision's going to notify me when he's eight hours out from being ready for surgery. I'll have one drink then, to make sure I don't get the shakes when it's time. Don't worry, I'm not going to get wasted before opening up this guy's back."

Rhodes had a lot to say about the fact that Tony was worried about getting the shakes after twelve hours without alcohol, but it could wait.


	2. Chapter 2

Wanda rapped lightly at the door. "Will I be distracting you?" she asked.

"No," said Vision, a half-smile curving the edges of his mouth. "I am capable of running thousands of simultaneous processes with no decrease in speed or accuracy."

Wanda looked down at the man lying still on the exam table. "What are you doing to him?"

"Collecting baseline, dose-response, and dose-interaction data across a full spectrum of bioinformatic-" Vision seemed to realize that this statement was not actually helpful to Wanda, so he amended. "I am giving him increasing doses of various drugs and drug combinations while monitoring his organ function so as to determine a safe and effective medication cocktail."

"Is he awake?" she asked.

"Yes, to some extent. His brain waves suggest wakefulness, but he is unresponsive due to combination of excruciating pain and extensive conditioning. I would advise against approaching him."

"He looks smaller."

"His size has not changed."

"No," said Wanda, "I mean that he frightened me before, so he seemed larger."

"He does not frighten you now?"

Wanda smiled very slightly, her eyes half-lidded. "No, there is still fear. Perhaps less fear. But there is also pity."

* * *

Contrary to popular belief, Tony Stark's narcissism had limits. For example, he knew that he is not actually qualified to sterilize a scalpel and start cutting through flesh in a therapeutic fashion.

He had robots for that.

Precision, surgical robots who would take care of all the unpleasant blood and skin and muscle that lay between Tony and a nice, solvable mechanical problem. Between a pair of exquisitely programmed automatons doing the manual work and an android intelligence serving as anesthesiologist, Tony could honestly say that he had a functional, if non-traditional, surgical suite at his disposal.

Besides, he had watched several YouTube videos of surgery and it seemed pretty straightforward.

He had a plan for how he would approach the metal plates attached to Barnes' spine and he was prepared to improvise if the plan went wrong. He had a backup plan in case Barnes started to wake up, in case he nicked an artery, in case the bone and steel were bonded too tightly together. Tony even had a plan in case he started imagining picana sodomy or Afghani caves or outer space missiles and had a panic attack.

"Do you have a plan in case you want to kill him?" asked Rhodes. "Not trying to be a downer, but I remember what you went through when they died. I remember dragging your ass out of bed trying to keep you from going entirely off the rails. I don't know how I'd handle it if I had the guy lying helpless in front of me."

It was a quintessential Rhodey question: concerned and uncomfortably honest.

"For the first few years," says Tony, "they have hardly any video. It's mostly hand-written notes and audio recordings. Barnes sings and whistles off-key to piss them off, to defy them. He's braver than I was and he doesn't even know his damn name. He sings army songs, stuff that would have been on the radio. They fuck with him so much he doesn't know who he is. He starts singing French children's songs. He starts singing black spirituals." Tony scowls. "I've got _Wade in the Water_ stuck in my head. He must've heard it from a church back in Brooklyn." Tony turned to Rhodes. "I don't know how I feel about him, but I know that if I want to punish him, keeping him alive is the best way to do it."

* * *

It turned out that surgery was a more complicated endeavor than Tony Stark had anticipated.

It also turned out that Tony Stark was a brilliant and resourceful man.

He replaced the five damaged anchor points with new panels made of a lightweight, rigid alloy. He replaced the contact plate and struts with titanium. It would still hurt to lug that arm around – there was no getting around that – but the weight would be better distributed and the flesh around the support system would no longer be constantly inflamed.

Tony watched his robots close the incision. He had worked in a state of singular focus, the same way he did while building Iron Man suits, with no real awareness of anything beyond the engineering problem he faced. He kept any notion of _who_ he was working on outside of his consciousness. And now that it was over, Tony felt insubstantial and uncomfortable, guilty and resentful.

"Mr. Stark," said FRIDAY, "please be aware that Captain Rogers has entered the building via the south loading dock."

Tony sighed. He wasn't ready for the great patriotic wonder boy to be disappointed in him and fawn over Barnes. He couldn't even remember his original reason for not calling Steve, or his reason for giving in and using the stupid little flip phone. He almost rubbed his forehead miserably before remembering that he was still wearing bloody surgical gloves. He began removing his sterile coverall and answered his A.I. "Route him down here, holding room on the left."

"Yes, sir," said FRIDAY.

* * *

Steve Rogers was standing with his feet shoulder-width apart (pretty damn far, given how stupidly wide his shoulders were) with his hands behind his back. It was his command pose. "How much longer?" he asked.

"Until…?" Tony raised his eyebrows. Steve hadn't bothered with pleasantries, although neither had he wasted much time berating Tony for practicing medicine without a license.

"Until he wakes up," said Steve.

"He's already awake," said Tony, with his usual cheerful dismissiveness. "I mean, he has to lay prone for a few more hours until the incision is more stable, but he's back in the realm of the miserably conscious. Right now he's," Tony glanced at his tablet, "listening to the Vision try to convince Wanda that the distinction between 'good smells' and 'bad smells' is arbitrary." Tony frowned with a little shake of his head. "It's not going well," he whispered solemnly.

Because Steve looked murderous, Tony grabbed a nearby tablet and brought up video of the recovery room. Barnes was face down. He looked unkempt, but he wasn't pale and sweaty, the way he'd been when he first arrived at the Avengers facility. The monitors showed his breathing and heart rate to be steady. Vision's voice could be heard in the background: "We agree that volatile particles are morally neutral and that olfactory chemoreception is-" Tony put the tablet back down.

Steve looked toward the door, obviously itching to go see Barnes.

"Not so fast," said Tony. "I'm helping him out here. I'm not turning you in. I think I at least deserve to know how he ended up on my damn doorstep."

"We were trying to deprogram him," said Steve. "Make sure no one could go after him with those command words like Zemo did. We…found a psychologist."

"I know you've been staying at Casa Wakanda, Rogers."

"Fine, T'Challa offered us a specialist. Very talented. He coached Romanoff to work through this counterconditioning procedure."

"Because the shrink didn't speak Russian, got it," Tony filled in.

"Romanoff would use the command words and give Bucky impossible orders. She told him to read aloud a slip of paper that said, 'I command you to be quiet'. She told him to jump five meters in the air, to bend an adamantium rod, and so on. That went…okay the first few times." Steve had a look on his face that indicated 'okay' was probably being generous. "Then she gave him an order that had to do with me."

"What was the order?"

"To knock me over using just his right index finger."

"So tall, dark, and felonious went and flicked your forehead and then what?"

"He became…aggressive," said Steve. "He charged me, knocked me back. I hit my head on a bolt, went down. Scott tried to help."

"By summoning a horde of insects? That guy is-"

"By getting big," interrupted Steve. "He lifted Bucky up by his left arm, which is probably how the damage was done."

"Tell Scott not to feel too bad about it. Based on the bone growth around the plates, the attachment system has been pretty fucked up for a long time. He should feel bad about calling himself 'Ant-Man' though. That's just…" Tony shuddered.

"Scott exhausts quickly when he's big. He lost hold of Bucky, who escaped and…ran here, I guess." Steve looked down. "Thank you. For helping him. For not turning him in."

"Yeah, I'm a real nice guy," said Tony.

Steve smiled, just a little. "Modest, too."

Tony stepped to the side, gesturing to the door. "Go see your BFF."

* * *

"Is Colonel Rhodes still here?" Steve was standing in the workroom doorway.

"No," said Tony. "He had to get back to being boring."

"Tell him thanks from me. From both of us."

"Sure."

Steve wasn't leaving. Tony wanted to continue focusing on hydraulic torque and Steve wasn't leaving.

"I understand," said Steve, "that you've recovered more information on his captivity under HYDRA."

Tony shook his head. "You don't want to see this shit."

"It would help with the deprogramming, to know exactly what they did to him."

"You're going to try again?" Tony yelled. "After what just happened?"

"What choice do I have?"

"Argh!"

Steve didn't move.

"Fine," said Tony, "you want to see one so you can martyr yourself for your Bucky?" He didn't even wait for Steve to nod because he knew there was only one possible answer. He tapped at his keyboard and a short clip appeared on the display. Tony pulled up what was arguably the least upsetting video in the entire archive.

The man in the video sat down across the table from Barnes. "English," said the man, "my English is not good. But we talk. I try a little English and you try a little Russian?"

Barnes snorted with a cocky grin. "I already tried a little Russian, pal. Hey, that reminds me: tell your sister I had a great time last night."

Steve unsuccessfully suppressed a chuckle. He showed no sign of quitting while he was ahead.

See? Tony tried being nice, but Steve wasn't getting it. He still thought he wanted to see all these damn videos. Tony pulled up another one, a little worse this time.

In this video, six guards were attempting to remove Barnes from his holding cell. Barnes, for his part, was violently resisting, albeit in a fairly uncoordinated fashion. He elbowed and kicked whoever came near and spewed shockingly profane bile. He threatened to rape one guard's infant daughter and called another a string of slurs against his ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation (although there was no reason to believe the man was black, Jewish, or gay). Even Tony felt uncomfortable.

Steve nodded. "Keep going."

In the next clip, Barnes was seated at the same table as in the first video, across from a new interrogator, this one speaking fluent English. "I am not asking you for troop movements or weapon specifications," said the man. "I don't want you to tell me secrets. I don't want to hurt you. You're hungry. I want to help."

"Then give me some goddamn food," spat Barnes.

"How about a simple question? What is the capital of Pennsylvania?"

"You're not going to start with name, rank, and serial number?"

"Would you tell me if I did?" asked the man as Barnes glowered. "Those are difficult questions. We start with something easy. What is the capital of Pennsylvania?"

Barnes looked almost surprised that he knew the answer, but he quickly suppressed the expression. "Harrisburg," he sighed.

The man shook his head. "That is incorrect. The capital of Pennsylvania is Philadelphia."

"No," said Barnes, "I know this. It's Harrisburg. I learned it in-" He stopped himself, because he did not know where or when he learned this fact.

"It is a small error," said the interrogator. "No matter. You have forgotten and now you are learning the truth. Say it after me: The capital of Pennsylvania is Philadelphia."

"It's…it's Harrisburg, isn't it?" asked Barnes, but without conviction. Hadn't he heard somewhere that the capital was Harrisburg?

"Say it. The capital of Pennsylvania is Philadelphia."

"It doesn't matter," said Barnes, with just a hint of desperation.

"I am trying to help you."

"Then let me go."

"Let me help you," whispered the man, quiet and conspiratorial. "Say it."

"The capital of Pennsylvania…is Philadelphia." Barnes looked almost sad at this admission.

"Thank you," said the man, looking palpably relieved. He signaled to the door and food was brought in. The video wasn't clear enough to show exactly what Barnes was fed, but the air of reverence spoke volumes.

Tony paused the video feed. "There are a few more like that, where they try to convince him that something true isn't. He plays along faster and faster each time. Then he tries to strangle Mr. Mindfuck. That's when they move on to Plan B, which is good ole' fashioned torture. There's a few videos of that, but we can skip-"

"No," said Steve. "He lived through it; I can watch it."

Tony rolled his eyes very slightly with a barely audible sigh. "That is…not a healthy approach, but fine, whatever." He taps a few keys and a new video began to play.

Barnes was in a completely enclosed brick room. There must've been a door, but it was in the camera's blind spot. There were about three inches of water in the cell, enough to cover Barnes' bare feet. He was wearing black pants and no shirt, with his arms bound to his body in some complicated arrangement. Pictures were projected onto the wall, labeled in Cyrillic script as a neutral voice named them in Russian.

Barnes roared and ran at the wall. Before he could make it to the edge, there was a loud, angry blast of noise and a flash of light. They had electrified the water. They shocked him.

"It's actually much louder than that," explained Tony. "Your ears might regenerate just fine, but I had to turn it down."

The shocks and the noise continued until Barnes stood back up, with no regard for the way electric shocks must have prevented muscles from obeying commands. He tried marching in place which caused more shocks and noise. He tried leaning on the wall. Shocks and noise. He tried to shout in English. Shocks and noise.

"This goes on for days," said Tony, skipping forward in the video.

A platform was added. A very small platform that only rose an inch over the water. Barnes could stand on the platform with both feet together and careful attention to balance. When he did so, he was not subjected to the noise or the electric shocks. But he could not sleep. As soon as he drifted off, his lost balance and he was painfully reawakened. Since his arms were bound, this often involved falling fully into the water, leaving more of his body exposed to the shocks as he desperately felt his way back to the platform.

Eventually – Tony is unsure how long, but many, many days – the room was drained and the platform was removed. Barnes was still not allowed to sleep – the loud noise was played if he shut his eyes for too long, and thanks to classical conditioning, he flinches as though shocked. The neutral voice has moved on from naming pictures to speaking in sentences. Barnes has realized that repeating after the voice in Russian does not lead to pain and he does so.

The video skips ahead to Barnes weeping on the floor of his cell, his legs gathered to his chest and his eyes pressed against his kneecaps. It was a childish pose.

"пожалуйста," Barnes whimpered in a boy's voice. It's not that the pitch was higher than usual for Barnes, though it was, but the pathetic, pleading tone. "Где моя мать? Где моя мама?"

Stark's computer translated, "Please, where is my mother? Where is my mama?"

"Прости," cried Barnes.

"I'm sorry," echoed the computer.

"Я буду хорош."

"I will be good."

"Я хочу, чтобы мои мама и папа. Пожалуйста, помогите мне. Пожалуйста. Я хочу, чтобы мои мама и папа."

The computer translation announced: "I want my mom and dad. Please help me. Please. I want my mom and dad."

A man entered the cell, the mindfuck interrogator. He sat down next to Barnes on the floor and gently guided Barnes' head to his lap. It wasn't a sexual pose, but a parental one. He stroked Barnes' hair as he continued to cry. The man said, "Я тебя сейчас, маленький. Вы будете активом для всего человечества."

Stark's computer translated: "I have you now, little one. You will be an asset for all mankind."

Barnes relaxed into the man's hold, accepting the comfort as he began to hiccup.

"Turn it off," said Steve. He struggled visibly to contain himself. This wasn't _worse_ than watching torture, but he knew that Bucky would be mortified to find out that Steve saw him in that state.

Tony stopped the playback. "I warned you, didn't I?"

Steve shook his head. "Go on to the next video."

"How about not," said Tony. "You're just punishing yourself and that doesn't help anyone."

Steve was silent for a long time. "What happened after that? I don't need the videos. Just tell me."

"They started training him. Advanced combat, espionage, languages, mechanical skills. That went on for months, maybe a year, before he started to get surly. Manages to enucleate his own eyeball with his fingers – which is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen, by the way – and they decide to break him down again, similar procedure as before, but more sensory deprivation. He's less crying kid and more empty shell this time around. They like that better. They train him for a while. This is the time when they implant all the command words. Anyways, they keep that up for a while before breaking him down again one last time just for shits and giggles – I can't find any record as to why they did it – and when he comes out, he's ready to be the Winter Soldier." Tony said the title in a way that gave it capital letters.

Steve's brow was forward and his eyes were shut. He breathed in and out very slowly.

Tony decided it was better to just continue and rip off the band-aid. "They put him in cryo between missions to extend his lifespan. They wipe him after each mission so that if he's captured he can't spill details of old ops. It was just practical. It wasn't until the third or fourth time that they realized it was helping to keep him from resisting their control. And then it was just mission-and-freeze for the next six decades, like the world's shittiest version of Netflix and chill." Tony paused, passingly aware of the inappropriateness of his own allusion. "Occasionally he came out of cryo angry. Killed a few techs that way. No clear pattern as to what triggered it. He learned to fear the chair, terrified of it, but not fighting it."

Steve somehow looked more stricken than before. "How could he, if they kept wiping his memories of it?"

"I'm not a neuroscientist," said Tony, "but I know there was this famous patient who had massive brain damage, couldn't form any new memories. Every time he saw a person, he thought it was the first time he'd met them. And the docs, they showed him this cognitive test called the Tower of Hanoi. He said he'd never seen it before. They told him the rules and had him give it a try. He sucked, of course he did, he'd never done it before. But they brought it back every day, and every day he swore he'd never seen it before, didn't know the rules. Even so, he got better and better at it until you had this guy saying, 'I've got no idea what this thing is,' while he completely solved it." Tony shrugged. "Moral of the story is that there's more than one kind of memory. Maybe fear and the Tower of Hanoi are stored differently than the kinds of memories he lost."

"I never looked for him," said Steve softly. "After he fell from the train."

"Of course you didn't," said Tony reasonably. "Because all logic dictated that he was dead. I'm assuming you also never checked whether FDR was magically transfigured into an all-knowing Dutch elm, either."

"Rhodes never stopped looking for you."

"How the hell do you know-" Tony interrupted himself. "No, I don't even have to ask. Fury told you everything, didn't he? I bet he did, because it's obviously your business what I-"

"It wasn't Fury. Rhodes told me."

Tony looked distinctly displeased by this revelation. "And do the two of you often hang out behind my back?"

"It wasn't behind your back, Tony. It was at that party you threw before…uh…before Ultron."

Tony was thinking about many disconnected things at that moment. He was thinking about watching the Ten Rings threaten to put a hot coal in Yinsen's mouth. He was thinking about the Accords. He was thinking about Barnes, meekly submitting to Hydra memory wipes. He was thinking about the way Rhodey looked at his parents' funeral, trying to keep Tony upright and whispering, "Nobody's gonna judge you for crying, man." He was thinking about how embarrassingly infantile it was to be jealous of Barnes, to be resentful that Rogers had rejected their hard-won friendship to focus on a monosyllabic serial killer. He was thinking about the video of his parents' murder and all the other videos he'd had to watch to convince himself to help their murderer.

The only thing Tony said was, "You should go see Barnes."

* * *

"Bucky," whispered Steve.

Barnes made an inexpressive groaning noise. Wanda tapped the Vision on the shoulder and tipped her head toward the door. After searching his database of human gestures and integrating this information with his present context, Vision stood to leave. "I am capable of monitoring Sergeant Barnes' vital signs remotely. I will do so."

"Thanks, Vision," said Steve. He knelt by the gurney where Bucky was still lying face down. "Hey Buck," he said, "it's me. I want you to know that I'm fine. I just got knocked out. But you always did say I have a thick skull, right?

"I don't remember that," said Bucky.

"That's okay," said Steve. "We'll fix this. We'll get you back to yourself."

Bucky didn't answer.

"I'm not going to give up on you, Bucky. Not ever."

* * *

Two days later, Barnes was well enough to go back to Wakanda. No one had actually discussed the issue, but Tony at least seemed willing to let the Barnes and Rogers leave, rather than arresting them under the Accords. In fact, Tony had spent the last two days hiding in his workshop while the Vision administered post-operative care and Steve entertained his friend with stories of their childhood.

Barnes entered the workshop. He didn't turn down the music or wait for Tony to acknowledge him. "Thanks," he said. Barnes left the workshop.

Steve Rogers rapped on the workshop door. "JARVIS," he began, "no, wait, I mean the new A.I. Sorry."

"I'm called FRIDAY," said a woman's voice. Tony's A.I.s always made Steve uncomfortable for a range of reasons, not least of which was he didn't know where to look when talking to them. That this one was female only made things more awkward.

"Ms. FRIDAY," said Steve, "can you please let me in? I'd like to talk to Tony."

"I'm sorry," said the voice. "Mr. Stark is in a meeting and cannot be disturbed."

"He's not in a meeting. I can see him. He's working on a car."

"I'm _so_ sorry," repeated the voice. "Mr. Stark is simply not available."

Steve rolled his eyes. This was ridiculous. Was Stark trying to give himself some kind of plausible deniability? Who would believe that? The Avengers compound had what was, to the best of Steve's knowledge, literally the best security in the world. Steve knocked on the door again. "FRIDAY, could you just tell Tony that-"

The door opened.

Stark stood on the other side, wearing filthy slacks and a tank top, a grease stain down his left cheek. "What do you want, Rogers?"

"We're leaving and I wanted to thank you for…for what you did for Bucky."

Stark sighed and rolled his eyes. He started to say something, then apparently thought better of it as he closed his mouth. He started again, paused, and finally said, "I was a different person when I got back from Afghanistan."

"Okay," said Steve, just a little wary.

"That was three months, not seventy years and they didn't do to me one one-thousandth of the shit they did to Barnes. And I was a whole different person."

"What are you getting at?"

"I've watched you with him." No one remarked on this invasion of privacy. "You're acting like what you see now is this fake, this façade. That the real guy, your best friend from the 40's, is just below the surface. Maybe he's not. Maybe stop calling him Bucky."

* * *

"Hey," said Steve, taking the jump seat next to Barnes. Thanks to the Vision's data, they were able to keep him lightly sedated – conscious, but calm. "Do you remember, I mean actually remember, people calling you Bucky? I mean, before you fell."

Barnes contorted his face as he thought, and then further as he tried not to disappoint. "I…I don't…I'm not sure."

Steve was prepared for that answer and so was able to control his reaction. "Don't worry about it," he said. "We've still got about eight hours in the air. You can go back to sleep."

* * *

"I think this officially makes me a qualified surgeon," said Tony with another sip of his scotch. "So do they just mail me a medical license or do I have to fill out some paperwork?"

Rhodes rolled his eyes. "You are never touching a scalpel again." He was drinking beer and was considerably more sober than Tony. "And we still need to talk about your drinking."

"Yes, _please_ , Mother Dearest! You simply _must_ tell me what I should do to be a good little boy."

"Shut the fuck up, Tony."

They both drank again and loaded up a new round of Smash Bros. Rhodey played as Samus. Tony played as Kirby. He _always_ played as Kirby. Rhodey won. He _always_ won.

"It's fucked up," said Rhodes, "what they did to Barnes."

"Yeah," said Tony, pouring himself another drink.

"It's fucked up," said Rhodes, "what they did to you." He didn't specify whether the antecedent of 'they' was the Ten Rings, Hydra and it's frozen assassin, or Rogers and his crew.

"Yeah," said Tony taking a long, deep swig. "Yeah.


End file.
